WORDS THAT BUILD: Communicate to Clients an Evolving Perspective Rather than a Fixed Clarity about Projects
Tip #19: Choose words and phrases that depict your architecture as a mysterious promise, as well as a known product.By Norman WeinsteinOctober 7, 2009

Editor’s Note: This is the 19th in an exclusive
series by Norman Weinstein focusing on the overlooked foundations of
architecture: oral and written communication.

Count yourself among the
blessed few if your architectural education included a course on communicating
with clients. But whether training included communication education or not,
sometime during your high school days you were probably taught that a major
goal of oral and written communication was attaining clarity, comprehensiveness,
and conciseness. You would be hard put to find any diploma holder who didn’t
have these “three Cs” driven home somewhere along their scholastic path.

Only a fool would badmouth
the importance of clarity in communicating. But I suggest that it is a mistake
to stop with clarity as a goal in relating to clients. Here’s my
counterintuitive premise: after clarifying communication with a client, you
need to suggest a mystery. This premise comes from two sources. First
there’s Louis Kahn’s notion that “architecture makes the measurable
immeasurable.” The measurable dimensions of architecture – the plans on paper
and computer monitor – demand a clear understanding between architects and
clients. The dimensions of architecture as it moves through materialization
into starting its life occupied, activated, deals with the immeasurable.
Perhaps even the most thorough of post-occupancy evaluations are still only
painfully partial glimpses of complex unfolding realities.

Consider the contribution of
environmental psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan identifying four
qualities that help us understand a landscape: coherence, legibility,
complexity, and mystery. Coherence means the ease with which we comprehend an
entire landscape at once, how well it hangs together. Legibility is the clarity
with which we discern pathways through it. Complexity deals with the density of
information to interpret in a landscape. And mystery refers to the promise of
new information the more we move through a landscape, the seductive lure of “what’s
around the next bend.”

The design you sell to your
client is a realized coherent, legible, and complex object. It is also a
gradually unfolding promise of new experiences of meaning as the architecture
ages, the point of Stewart Brand’s brilliant study, How
Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built. The language you use to communicate the coherent,
legible, and complex identity of your project is literal, limiting,
quantifiable, and quite measurable in terms of site preparation, space-making,
materials, labor, etc. – as clear as your bill for services. The language you
need to communicate the mystery of your architecture needs to evoke the
immeasurable meanings that will gradually emanate through time. This is
challenging since only starchitects can afford to communicate in arcane
metaphysical code hinting at “immeasurable qualities.” Most clients won’t want
to eagerly pay for services that can’t be sharply, quantifiably described.

The solution? Your written
and spoken communication with clients needs to constantly shuffle between lucid
“nuts-and-bolts” descriptions and evocations of immeasurable (but nevertheless
real) experiences connected to the architecture. As loony as it might sound,
suppose you began your serious dialogue with clients with their imagined
post-occupancy evaluations, and then worked their fantasies into plans to make
those desired experiences within architecture materialize. You would begin not
with what clients want the architecture to look like from exterior or interior
views. You would start with unquantifiable psychological and spiritual outcomes
your clients want to have enduringly identified with this project – a distant
object on the horizon in need of becoming a promise realized. And then you
would discuss the budget and schedule as making possible the long-term
unfolding of those desired experiences.

Concretely (pun intended),
your client’s long-range desires, past initial occupancy, call for a mix of
plain words and symbolically-charged words with symbolic resonance. Consider
the entire sustainable revolution now permeating much of the A/E/C industry as
a regeneration of language use. Once lighting and air conditioning are
explained in terms of lumens and BTUs, we can freely espouse notions of
“therapeutic daylighting” and “thermal delight” along with quantifiable
descriptions of lighting and HVAC.

Shakespeare foresaw this
enriching of the language of architecture:

And
as imagination bodies forth

The
forms of living things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns
them into shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A
local habitation and a name.

Norman
Weinsteinwrites about architecture and design forArchitectural RecordandThe
Christian Science Monitor. He consults with architects and engineers
interested in communicating more profitably. You can reach him atnweinste@mindspring.com.